LAME DEER — As Crystal Hiwalker plays with the 3-week-old puppies outside of her rural home in Lame Deer, she is grateful to still be alive.
Hiwalker said embracing life, finding the beauty in everything and being a better person is what she has done every day for the last five years after the winter of 2019, when she technically died multiple times.
From what Hiwalker remembers from the day that changed her life, she was loading wood when she first started to faint. She fainted again while driving home. She called her husband who told her to go to the doctor.
“We ended up finding out I was pregnant and then (the doctor) was saying it was an ectopic pregnancy. He told me that I was bleeding and that they needed to get me to Billings as soon as possible," Hiwalker said on Tuesday.
But the blizzard outside at the time made it so that a helicopter couldn't land to get Hiwalker.
Once a volunteer ambulance service was able to transport Hiwalker to Billings, it took 2.5 hours to make it to the hospital. She died three times on the way, with her husband, William Kellum, having to help perform CPR in the back of the ambulance.
“I died from massive blood loss,” Hiwalker said. “I think if we would have had blood like in between like, Crow or Hardin, it would have been a lot easier for him and the worker and, like, the ambulance, you know.”
When reviewing Hiwalker's case, it was found that two spots were passed that they could have gotten blood from. The Montana State Trauma Care Committee became determined to not let this happen again.
“The question came up, why can't we pick up blood as we drive by a facility and continue on to definitive care?” Alyssa Johnson, the trauma system manager for the state of Montana, said. “We have this map of red dots and purple dots on who actually has at least one unit of blood.”
So, the Montana Interfacility Blood Network, a first-of-its-kind program, was born in 2022. It allows first responders to arrange to pick up blood from facilities with at least one unit for their patients in eastern Montana.
“People felt that this was needed in a rural state like ours," Johnson said. "In May of this year, it won the Paragon Award for the 2024 trauma innovation award.”
Hiwalker was stabilized at Billings Clinic, where she remained in the ICU for a few days before making a full recovery.
